“Are you sure?” I ask, desperate. “He’s not working today? He’s not working right now?”
Kari looks at me, seems to follow my gaze to the exact spot where Bus Boy should be standing, where he is in plain sight, then frowns. “I’m sure.”
“She would know; she’s the assistant manager,” Katy says as we back away from the counter.
“I know,” I snap, because my head is buzzing, filling with questions and absurdities. What scares me, what terrifies me, is that I think they are right. Katy. Kari. The problem is me.
Suddenly I’m back on the bus, talking to Bus Boy for the first time, and Goth Guy and the mother with her two children are giving me weird looks. Who are you talking to? their looks say now. I didn’t know that at the time.
Caleb, yesterday, in the driveway. I wasn’t even that close, he’d said. And he wasn’t—not to me. He nearly ran Bus Boy over because he didn’t see him.
On Monday at this theater—the Indian kid who bumped into me and couldn’t stop staring, and then Katy dragging me away without seeing Bus Boy. Neither of them saw him then, either?
Oh God.
Katy is speaking. “My mom, she can…”
Go to my parents, make them pull my reins in even tighter. Have me admitted into a psychiatric facility? Make sure I never, ever leave Lyndale?
“No, no,” I say. “It’s just from hitting my head.”
“Addie.”
“Promise me,” I demand. “On my life. You can’t tell anyone. I just need more sleep. Let me just try that.”
Katy is shaking her head. “I can’t take more secrets.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know—my, my friends,” she stammers. “From Act! Out! and school and stuff. I just feel like I’m keeping everybody’s secrets.”
I narrow my eyes at her; she looks away.
“Please,” I say.
“What if something happens to you?” she asks now, glaring at me. “What do I say then?”
“Nothing will happen,” I answer, even as I cut my gaze from her to Bus Boy. “Promise me.”
“Okay,” she promises, but she looks like she hates herself after she does. “Please let’s go home. Please.”
He’ll go away, I tell myself, watching him as we head toward the exit. I don’t know if I’m expecting him to disappear before my very eyes, to turn watery and pale like a ghost. He doesn’t.
We leave.
He stays.
BEFORE
Mid-July
I can usually find him in the exact same position—behind the counter of the movie store, sorting DVDs or working on the computer. But today he’s nowhere in sight.
Having watched nine Ciano movies—and having made nine visits to the movie store—I was dragging my feet going in to return the last one. Trying to think of ways to extend this—this friendship? Discussion group?
I might also have spent more time than I normally do on my look.
And Zach isn’t even here.
I’m hovering at the New Releases section, scanning the aisles, when Mr. Laird walks out of the breakroom and past me.
“Hi, Addie! You smell lovely!” Crap. I flush at Mr. Laird’s comment. My mom is forever telling me to spray only on the pulse points, but (blame the influence of Katy) all over just seems more effective. That is, if I’m trying to attract forty-five-year-old men.
“Thanks, Mr. Laird,” I say, hoping to God that Zach is not somewhere nearby overhearing this conversation.
“Is Zach in the storeroom?” That’s where he said he’d be if he wasn’t at the counter.
“No, he’s out back,” his father says, frowning at a movie poster and trying to make sure it’s straight. He suddenly turns to me. “You march right back in here and tell me if you see him smoking, do you understand?”
“Um, okay,” I say, not sure how I feel about ratting Zach out, but glad it seems Mr. Laird is giving me permission to go through the back door of the movie store to “out back.” Also, Zach smokes?
Still holding on to the DVD, I head back through a small, dark room that seems to be mostly storage and find Zach outside. He jumps a full foot when I shut the door. And then he smiles, relieved it’s just me and, I think, happy it’s me.
“Hi, Zach,” I say, then shut my eyes.
“Hi?” His voice ticks up at the end, a question.
“You’re wondering why I’m shutting my eyes.”
“Yes?” Another question.
“Your father said that if I found you smoking I was to—and I quote—march right back in there and tell him.” Zach laughs, and I feel myself grinning, stupid, eyes closed. “I have not seen you smoking.”
“You will not see me smoking,” he says, moving around me, presumably putting the cigarette out, and then stopping in front of me. I sense him close to me, sense his cigarette-y breath. “You may open your eyes.”
I do and am blinded by his hundred-watt smile.
“Last one,” I say, holding up the DVD case before I forget all my thoughts.
“And?” Zach holds the door open for me, then pauses to pull a pack of mints out of his pocket. He offers me one but I shake my head, wondering how much he has thought about the condition of my mouth. Or rather, if he has thought about the condition of my mouth as much as I have considered the thought of his.
“I’m ranking it between The Mask of Falling and Volvo Lost. The ending just didn’t hold up.”
“Hmm,” he says thoughtfully. “Even with Beppe coming back?”
“Especially with Beppe coming back.”
“Hmm,” he says again, looking at the floor, as we head toward the Horror section. I think for a second that he’s trying to figure out what to recommend for me next, but instead he glances up at me. “I have something to ask you.”
My heart skips one, two, three beats. What Katy calls a Cardiac Event.
Is he going to ask me out?
“What is it?” I ask, and it’s only as I’m whispering it back that I realize that Zach whispered first.
“I don’t think,” he says quietly but not quite whispering. “I don’t think I ever told you that I’m, um”—he seems embarrassed—“an aspiring filmmaker.”
I stare blankly at him. Okay, so maybe he isn’t asking me out.
“God, that sounds pretentious. But I am.”
A second of silence passes before I offer, “Like Ciano?”
His fanaticism makes complete sense now.
Zach glances up at me, his eyes twinkling like I get it. “Yes,” he says, a tremor of excitement in his voice. “Exactly like Ciano.”
To say that my heart is experiencing a steady fall downward is an understatement. “That’s awesome.” I hope I at least sound enthusiastic.
“Well, I have to work on the accent. And the handlebar mustache,” he says, chuckling. “Did you watch the behind-the-scenes commentary, by the way? Did you expect him to look like that? I love how he plays into all the clichés. Even in the way he looks. Like, that little Italian director twiddling his handlebar mustache. Who comes up with that shit?”
I smile. “You wanted to ask me something.”
“Yes,” Zach says. “I’m working on a little film this summer. My friend Raj and I wrote the script, and I was wondering if maybe you’d be in it?”
“Me?” There’s obviously no one else around, but of all the outrageous things I thought Zach might ask me—for a date, maybe, or even my hand in marriage—I would not have expected this, and I can’t help wondering if someone else has popped up behind me.
He nods, smiling at me until my shock wears off.
“I can’t act!”
“Exactly,” he laughs. “I mean, not that you can’t act. That has yet to be determined, but you saw Ciano’s stuff. No skill required.”
“But…” I try to come up with an excuse, any excuse.
“I think you’d be perfect for it,” Zach says, and ugh, his eyes find mine. I don’t have the sense to look away.
“I could…I mean, I can try, I guess.”
“Perfect,” Zach says as we reenter the main area of the store. I follow him around to the counter. “Here. We’ll be shooting it at my house, so I’ll write down where I live, and today’s Wednesday. Does Saturday work for you to do a test run, and then we’ll start on Monday?” He pulls out a piece of paper, some faded old receipt, and scribbles on it. It’s the first time I notice that he is left-handed.
While he’s sliding it over to me, a customer—an older man in a business suit, picking something up during his lunch break—comes up to check out a stack of movies. Zach turns away to help him, but the man doesn’t have an account, so they have to set up a new one. I’m holding on to the receipt, waiting for Zach to finish, when an idea pops into my head.
I don’t know if it makes me desperate or brave or nothing at all, but I decide that, short of straight-up asking him out, there’s really only one way to know if Zach even remotely likes me. I mean, maybe he’s this friendly and charming to anyone.
So while he’s busy inputting the man’s details, I tear off the bottom of the receipt he gave me and scribble my cell number on it. Maybe he won’t even see it. Maybe he’ll think it’s just in case he needs to reach me, even though he never asked for it, and my mom’s number is on the store’s computer system. But before I can change my mind, before I can convince myself that this isn’t the kind of thing I would normally do, I put the note down on the counter, stick the pen over it, call goodbye to Zach, and head out.
For the first time in over a week, I leave At Home Movies DVD-less. But with Zach’s number and address. A starring role in his slasher film. And an open invitation for him to call me.
AFTER
January
I write the note on a piece of paper torn from the back of my Spanish notebook.
Sometimes I write down things I’m desperate to remember. My sheet music is full of notes and PSs to myself.
If I’m asking, then I can’t be, is what this one says.
Crazy, is what it doesn’t.
Is it true that if you suspect you are, then you can’t be insane?
I hope it is, so I keep the note folded in my pocket for six days. For reassurance.
I can’t be crazy.
Crazy means stuck here in this town.
But crazy is seeing a boy nobody else can. A person who doesn’t exist.
I haven’t seen him since Thursday in the Cineplex with Katy, but I am determined not to again.
I steal two sleeping pills from Mom’s cabinet and try them, one at a time, because I am still lying awake at night, mind swirling with spinning buses and trees. And now invisible boys. It helps with the sleep, but not the unshakable feeling that something is wrong.
I get onto the treadmill Mom folds up and down in the guest room, since exercise is supposed to be good for your mind.
At dinner, I finish the peas in the salad Mom makes, instead of pushing them to the edge of my plate like I’ve always done.
I don’t know if any of this is working. I only know that I’m exhausted.
It’s taking all the energy and concentration I have to focus in school, to follow conversations during lunchtime, to not keep whirling around in my seat, expecting to find my world inhabited by dozens of invisible people. And I think I’m doing a fairly good job of this, of fixing my eyes on things that are solid and certain and close enough to touch.
Until Wednesday, when the boy shows up at school.
I catch only a glimpse from the corner of my eye. A tall, lanky figure at the window of the music room during orchestra practice.
My fingers freeze on the bow and my heart seizes as I whip my head to the right to make sure it wasn’t just a shadow, a trick of the light.
It’s not.
I’m sitting in the viola section near the center of the room, with Katy and the other second violinists to my right. Only one seat separates Katy from the window, and I can’t take my eyes off the glass. I try to blink away the angular crook of his jaw, the clump of hair sticking out from underneath a black beanie. The cloud of air, of human breath, as he presses his forehead against the window, peering in.
It takes everything I have not to grab Katy’s arm and force her to look, to see how the mist of his breath stains the glass, how his teeth chatter noiselessly underneath our playing.
Tell me you can’t see him, I want to say.
How can you not see him?
But I’ve told her I haven’t seen him since the Cineplex, which is true. I went back there twice without Katy and he wasn’t there. I’ve told her I’m sleeping okay now, which isn’t exactly true, and I’ve tried to stay present when she talks to me, to remember the things she says.
So I can’t tell her he’s here.
I throw off the orchestra three times on one page.
Katy quirks her eyebrow up at me, silently demanding to know what’s with me.
Finally I set down my viola and bow. I ask for a bathroom pass from Mrs. Dubois and hustle out of the room, leaving Paulie rippling a particularly gassy set of notes through the air and Katy giggling behind me.
As soon as I’m in the hallway, I take off running toward the heavy doors that lead to the back of the building, outside the music room. Cold air slaps at my cheeks and chest and fingers, and I think vaguely that I should have retrieved my coat from my locker, but it’s too late now. I’m hurtling forward too quickly to stop or turn around. As I approach the music-room window, I see that he’s gone. There’s no one there.
I come to a stop a little ways from the window so no one from orchestra can see me, and try to catch my breath. I look for footprints or a dropped item or some sign that he was here, but there’s nothing.
And then I hear it.
A scrambled noise not far away, like feet crunching through snow.
I know it’s him immediately. It has to be.
“Hey!” I call. “Hey, wait!” I take off running again, sprinting on a shoveled walkway in the direction of the noise. I round the corner of the building too fast to stop myself from crashing into someone. He catches my elbows to stop me from toppling over.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he exclaims.
His voice is thick, and his face is wide, weathered by too many hours in the sun. He’s also in his forties.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
I blink several times, giving the image in front of me a chance to change, but it’s still Bert, our school groundskeeper. There’s no sign of the boy.
“And you’re not wearing a coat. Do you want to catch your death?”
I give a ferocious shake of my head, too out of breath and too disappointed to form words. I said almost exactly that to Bus Boy days ago.
“You okay?” he asks, letting me go, and I nod. He continues to give me an odd look, so I force myself to speak.
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
He looks like he doesn’t quite believe me, but he seems to let it go. “All right. Go back to class.” He starts to walk toward the snow-covered football field.
I turn and head back in the direction I just came from, stopping at the music-room window again to see if there’s anything I missed.
I saw him.
I freaking saw him.
With the adrenaline gone now, the cold sweeps over my skin and I hug myself to keep warm. My teeth are chattering, and I remember I saw his chattering, and I can’t be crazy. I can’t.
I slide down against the wall and sit on a snowy patch of ground, going over everything in my mind.
Every now and then, I have this one dream. I’m standing in the middle of a crowd—the food court in the mall or the park during a summer festival, sometimes a subway platform I’ve never actually been to—and suddenly all these things start to disappear. Cars, the grass, tables. People. It’s when the sound goes with them—the swirling wind or scores of laughing voices or the marching band that plays at summer festivals—that I start to panic. Forc
e myself awake.
I’m most afraid of the silence.
Of the space that is left by all the lives and people and things I can’t hold on to. I don’t know what makes them disappear, or where they disappear to. Only that the feeling terrifies me.
I skip back to the accident again, rewind to when he got on the bus, after I got on the bus. Fast-forward to the hospital and the movie theater and this window, five minutes ago. I’ve been doing it a lot the last few days, but I go over every detail I can think of again.
Just one more time. Just so I can figure out what I’m missing.
The weird thing is, he got on the bus before the accident, before I hit my head. Shouldn’t it have been after, if he’s the result of some sort of concussion? There has to be a way this makes sense.
But I can’t come up with anything, and by the time a couple of minutes have passed, I know I really am going to catch my death if I don’t go back in now.
I haven’t told my parents what I saw, and I’ve stopped telling Katy the truth. Because I don’t want them to think I am crazy. Because I don’t want whatever this is—this tangled, itching cloak over my mind—to cost me the things I want most. But I have to understand what’s happening.
I need to stop whatever’s happening.
My jeans are damp from the snow when I stand.
I can’t handle this on my own.
There has to be someone I can go to without involving my parents.
The vaguest of plans forming in my mind, I hurry back into the building. My wet shoes squeak against the floor as I make my way to my seat in the music room. Katy points at my fingers, wrinkly from the cold, as I flip to the right page in my binder. Gangrene, she mouths. Not frostbite, but gangrene.
“Okay?” she whispers. I nod, not looking at her, pick up my viola and bow, and focus on the sheets of paper in front of me as we wait for the strings to come in.
BEFORE
Mid-July
At the risk of sounding crazy, the great thing about being the only member of orchestra without a life is that it gives me plenty of time to practice and possibly get a leg up on everyone else when school starts in the fall.
Everyone We've Been Page 6
